


another apple to slice into pieces

by arbitrarily



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-22
Updated: 2011-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-22 22:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>maps can chart more than geography – they’ve been everywhere and they’ve seen it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	another apple to slice into pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the fall of 2009; no real spoilers and takes place in some nebulous period where either the season four finale never happened, or has yet to happen.

We have not touched the stars,  
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back  
to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes,  
not from the absence of violence, but despite  
the abundance of it.

(Richard Siken)

 

 

 **1.**

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth. Alan Moore.

 

 

 **2.**

In New Orleans a woman tells him: You a dead man, but you be alright.

They have no reason to put her in handcuffs, so they don’t. Hotch thinks this is the closest he has come to hate in a long time.

(The woman had called herself a psychic and Hotch had stood with Prentiss on the other side of the room, their skepticism shared in their mirrored body language.

She hears what the woman tells him, and later, as they walk to the car, the evening thick with humidity she will say:

She’s full of shit you know that right?)

 

 

 **3.**

It begins on the plane. But before that it began in a locker room, and before that a different city and a different precinct, a different locker room (the same plane). Before all of this, it began when a woman walked into his office and said: My name is Emily Prentiss, and he tried to say  _no_.

If you want a list of the things he will not speak of, she would rank somewhere near the top of it.

 

 

 **4.**

In Tampa it is hurricane season. 

In the elevator her skin looks damp; she had gone for a run, and he had been on the phone with Jack.

There are dead teenage boys being drowned in swimming pools. Outside his hotel room he can see the hotel pool, an unnatural bright blue that glows empty and unused.

In the elevator she had said: “I was thinking of taking a swim, but I thought. Well. Right. You know?” She had swallowed and there was a perfect line of sweat that found the raised ridge of her collarbone. 

“I used to love to swim,” she said.

 

 

 **5.**

On a Monday they stand shoulder to shoulder and she stirs sugar into her coffee. He pours his black.

There is to be a memorial service later in the day. A good man died. A good man always dies; a good man is always dying. Hotch thinks of his son; he burns his wrist on a spilled drop of coffee and hisses.

Prentiss arches an eyebrow but she doesn’t ask if he’s okay.

Instead she asks: “How was your weekend?”

He honestly can’t remember.

 

 

 **6.**

In a suburb outside of Lexington there is first a car chase and then a crash. Hotch drives. Prentiss sits shotgun. 

This is winter and the tires skid. One car flips over and Hotch slams the brakes; another car catches them from the side and as they spin out there is the wrenching shriek of metal on metal and the spray of shattered glass.

And then there is nothing.

The seatbelt cuts into his neck and his hands shake a little as he reaches to unbuckle it. His eyes burn in the cold air; he can taste blood in the back of his throat.

Next to him Prentiss groans.

He cups her face like it is the most natural thing in the world and she blinks fast, her lashes sticky with blood, the same blood that slides down the curve of her cheek and over his fingers.

She has a concussion but she’s fine. They’re all dying but they’re fine.

 

 

 **7.**

“You ever think about leaving the BAU?” he asked her once. It had been late. She had a disposable cup of coffee at her elbow and a file spread out in all its macabre glory. He leaned in the doorframe but did not enter.

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. I think about it the same way I think about, I don’t know, settling down, getting married, having kids. Maybe someday. Just not now.” She had paused and fingered the lid on her cup. “Why you ask?”

He had shrugged. “No reason,” he said. No reason.

 

 

 **8.**

Do you ever get tired keeping company with the dead?

 

 

 **9.**

In Reno the lights hurt his eyes and he pops three aspirin. Prentiss wants to gamble.

He thinks they already are and the house keeps winning.

 

 

 **10.**

In Reno, this starts.

There is a man killing high-price call girls. This man will turn out to be a hotel employee and the son of a prostitute but they don’t know this yet. 

They use Emily as bait. She goes undercover and a man winds up spread across a baccarat table, his insides for outsides.

Hotch walks in on her in the locker room and there is a feel of a pattern, or there would be, if this was to happen once more. The problem of profiling is you sometimes see constellations where none exist. The problem of profiling is you see everyone but yourself.

He understands most people. He doesn’t understand her.

He walks in and she pulls the dress over her head. He had seen her in the dress earlier. It was a little clingy black thing that he imagines is supposed to be generically attractive. There is blood on her dress.

She pulls the dress with the blood on it over her head and there is nothing on underneath.

“I’m sorry,” he says and his mouth is dry.

Emily does not hide herself and her nipples are hard, pink.

“Don’t worry about it.” She says it like a laugh and pulls a pair of jeans on.

 

 

 **11.**

On the plane, sometimes he lets himself consider it. Her big, wide eyes growing wider – not with fear, but something he doesn’t know how to name, he can’t open his mind that far – as he pushes into her that first time.

All men think like this. Reid would have statistics and Morgan would have pride. Hotch just has his certainty and images he can never shake.

 

 

 **12.**

In Washington DC someone is murdering aides on the Hill. The murders are neat and confined to the restrooms of the Senate and the House Office Buildings, never the Capitol. He hangs them with rope.

Hotch and Prentiss interview the offices now down one aide. The phones ring the entire time and teenage faux lobbyists fill the doorway with fliers protesting the war and baby killers and the President of the United States. The answers they get are useless and distracted.

They stop in a bar in Foggy Bottom on their way out of the city.

He drinks too much but drives them back anyway. He thinks this could be called evidence; he thinks this means he’s slipping.

Their killer gets sloppy by the end of the week. They catch him. He was one of the aides they had initially questioned.

“We’re all going to hang,” he snarls.

“Get him out of here,” Morgan barks.

Hotch holds the rope.

 

 

 **13.**

Before, in the bar in Foggy Bottom, on one television a Nationals game played and on the other an old Clint Eastwood film.

He ordered a beer and wished he had ordered something stronger. For his next drink he would. 

Prentiss took a sip of her beer and then leaned in. “Alright, spill,” she said. “What’s up?”

The beer wasn’t cold enough. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t give me that. You’ve been more… _stoic_  lately than usual. No, that’s not the word I’m looking for. Or maybe it is.”

“What’s your point?”

“Something’s bothering you.” She pointed at him suddenly and accusatorily. “And don’t give me that ‘we don’t profile each other’ bullshit. I’m not a profiler right now. I’m just being your friend.”

“My friend?”

“Sure. Two friends, having a drink after a long day of work.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. 

Over closed captioning Clint Eastwood said: go ahead, make my day.

 

 

 **14.**

He thinks about her and his bed and there she would be Emily and there she would call him by name, not Hotch, not there, and these things matter. The names we give and the names we choke on matter. He thinks about her wide eyes and all that dark hair, pale skin – 

“Sir?” JJ says. “We’re ready.”

There are dead schoolteachers in Vermont.

 

 

 **15.**

In Des Moines, Prentiss shoots the unsub in the head and there is the usual shock of bright red that explodes first into the air and then onto the pavement. It spills like tar, just as dark and sticky and sweet, and Hotch takes a deep breath and a step back. Prentiss lowers her gun. Her eyes are flat and unfocused.

You saved my life, he thinks but does not say it.

Instead she stands there with the flat, unfocused eyes and a hand at her hip and the holster. The locals swarm the scene and the cops take tentative steps towards the dead man (the dead devil) and the expanding pool of blood, like maybe it’s poison, maybe it’s quicksand, maybe it will like the taste of their boots.

Hotch steps towards her and she blinks. Her hair is pulled back tight from her face and she looks less like a woman and more like a weapon. He grips the jut of muscle that connects shoulder to neck and squeezes; the Velcro of her vest crackles under his hand.

She turns her head to face him sharply and her eyes burn too bright. It takes a moment, a tense moment of penetrating eye contact on both their parts, before she purses her lips and nods, once.

Hotch doesn’t say thank you. He thinks it would have been redundant.

 

 

 **16.**

“You look tired,” he said to her.

She laughed. “Oh, fuck you.”

He sat across from her and almost smiled. The plane hit turbulence and her own smile faltered.

“I’m very, very tired,” she whispered. “I’m always tired.”

He turned off the light.

 

 

 **17.**

In Charleston she almost drowns.

She is pushed over the edge and the waves crash over her head. The ocean is warm but her body is still cold when they pull her out. There is makeup under her eyes and her cheeks are sunken; she shivers and he gives her a blanket that smells like burning leaves.

In Savannah they almost lose Spencer.

A gun fires, a house catches fire, and he gets caught somewhere in between. Morgan finds him first, Reid’s mouth gaping open, a fish with no water. A doctor says he’ll be fine.

In Boise he almost shoots an innocent man.

The key word here is almost not innocent.

 

 

 **18.**

“You make house calls now?”

“Can I come in?”

“What are you doing here? You don’t come here.”

“Can I come in.”

 

 

 **19.**

It almost hurts to kiss her. There is a good moment where they just stand there – she has a cautious hand on his elbow and he wants to tell her that’s not necessary, that he’s steady, that he isn’t going to flee, not yet, not ever, he was never taught how to run fast and blind enough to flee, but he doesn’t think that’s what the hand is for. He has a hand barely skimming the narrowest point of indentation to her waist and the cotton under his fingers feels used. 

It’s not even that they’re kissing. Suddenly he is old and he is tired and suddenly she is the safest bet for him to keep. His forehead rests against hers, and their lips skim, their mouths open and it is more that he breathes her in than actually kisses her.

“Please,” she says.

 

 

 **20.**

It’s easy to say he has wanted this since he met her. It’s easy because it’s a lie, because it’s not the truth. He had not liked her then, he had Haley then, he did not want her there. 

That said, there is a comforting and lulling rhythm to the idea that maybe he had wanted her, that he had wanted this, the second she walked into his office and the second after when he politely tried to kick her out.

There is still a romantic somewhere in there, beneath the layers of child support payments and the one bedroom apartment and the law degree and the stack of photographs that depict little more than the evils one human being can perpetuate against another. There is a romantic.

Because that’s the thing everyone always forgets: the hero in these stories is always dark, he is always brooding, he is tragic and last of all, his romantic tendencies are the very last to erode.

(Romantic doesn’t mean what you think it does here. It does not mean roses and Sinatra and the best table at the best restaurant in town. Romantic here is a synonym for love, and in this business other words always masquerade in its place).

“I should have seen this coming,” Emily says. Hotch doesn’t argue with her. He lets her slide his shirt down his arms but he does not argue with her.

 

 

 **21.**

He fucks her ( _finally, finally_ , beat his hips, but that’s poetic and stupid, hips can’t talk and he would never say that) in front of the window that looks out onto the Potomac in her apartment.

It’s not what he imagined.

Then again, it never is.

 

 

 **22.**

On a Monday she stirs sugar into her coffee and he pours his black.

She does not ask him if he’s okay. She asks him how his weekend was.

Hotch doesn’t know how to answer that. Instead he wonders if it is possible to still smell his skin on hers.

In the conference room he watches the cut of her jaw out of the corner of his eye.

There is a man creating young widows in Minnesota.

There is a man stabbing old widows in Maine.

There are devils everywhere.

 

 

 **23.**

They’re all dead but they’ll be fine.

 

 

 **24.**

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. T.S. Eliot.

 

 

 **25.**

 _fin._


End file.
